I don’t care what your position on “free trade” is — the vast majority of ecoomists, left, right and middle, agree that trade produces both winners and losers. Ask almost any blue collar worker in the Midwest: even if it possible to show that the United States gains a net benefit from trade overall, that’s hardly comforting to a middle-aged man or woman who has just lost their job due to competition with China or Mexico.

The political consensus that government has a responsibility to those workers has a long history. As President John F. Kennedy declared when making the case for the Trade Expansion Act of 1962,” “When considerations of national policy make it desirable to avoid higher tariffs, those injured by that competition should not be required to bear the full brunt of the impact. Rather, the burden of economic adjustment should be borne in part by the Federal Government.”

Hatch’s argument is that the government is too broke to compensate losers. Forgive me if I sound like a broken record, but since the government is not too broke to subsidize insanely profitable oil companies, and is not too broke to afford deficit busting tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the real question here is one of priorities, not finances. And workers displaced by globalization and trade simply don’t rank.

Republican callousness to workers isn’t new, but Hatch’s “doesn’t make sense” argument signifies a new low in Congressional deal-making. Typically both sides compromise to get an agreement neither is completely happy with. Hatch’s position is: We won’t compromise, so you should just give up and do what we want.

I’d like to say that doesn’t make much sense, but since it seems to be the default GOP bargaining position right now, I guess we have to take it seriously.

But when it came to this year’s primaries, the Tea Party’s momentum was late-starting. It wasn’t until Aug. 24, when Joe Miller stunned Lisa Murkowski in an upset absolutely no one saw coming, that its potential became clear. As soon as the result came in, the Tea Party Express, which had quietly dumped $600,000 into Miller’s effort, turned its focus to Delaware, another state that was on no one’s radar. That support, along with the media’s sudden interest, transformed right-wing gadfly Christine O’Donnell into a player, and three weeks later she was declaring victory over Mike Castle, a nine-term congressman and fixture in Delaware politics.

It made you wonder what would have happened if the Tea Party had waged this focused an effort earlier in the year. For instance, Rep. Mark Kirk, a moderate congressman from just north of Chicago, won the GOP Senate nomination in Illinois on Feb. 3. He beat his closest competitor by 37 points, but he only finished with 56 percent of the vote — jarringly low when you consider the unanimous backing he received from state and national GOP leaders and his overwhelming financial and name-recognition advantages.

In hindsight, Kirk may have dodged a big bullet. The field was crowded, with multiple candidates claiming chunks and bits of Tea Party support. A clear challenger to Kirk never emerged, and the kind of national investment that the Tea Party Express made in Alaska and Delaware was missing. But what if Illinois’ primary had been scheduled for Sept. 14 — after Alaska? Kirk would have made an awfully ripe target for the emboldened Tea Party movement. The same probably goes for Roy Blunt, the ultra-establishment former House GOP whip who somehow escaped the Tea Party’s notice in his Aug. 3 primary in Missouri.

As it is, though, the Tea Party is out of Republican targets for 2010. But 2012 is just around the corner, and the Tea Party may pick up right where it left off when the next round of Senate primaries convenes..

This, at least, is what history suggests. The last time there was this much upheaval within the GOP was in the late 1970s, in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s challenge to President Gerald Ford in the 1976 primaries. While Reagan fell just inches short in that race, the writing was on the wall: The GOP’s demographics were changing and the conservative wing that Reagan represented would soon dominate; Ford’s win would be the Rockefeller crowd’s last stand.

After ’76, New Right activists set out to purge the remaining liberal Republicans from the party — a task that only took on more urgency when liberal Republican senators provided critical votes for Jimmy Carter’s Panama Canal treaty in 1977. To the right, this represented a blatant sellout of American sovereignty. In the 1978 midterms, the right organized several high-profile primary challenges. In New Jersey, they united behind a Reagan aide named Jeffrey Bell and took out an icon of liberal Republicanism, four-term Sen. Clifford Case. In Massachusetts, they rallied around a radio talk-show host and anti-busing crusader named Avi Nelson and nearly knocked off Sen. Ed Brooke, the only black Republican ever elected to the Senate. There was no collective name for the movement that did this, but in spirit and style, it was very much the Tea Party’s precursor.

And the movement didn’t stop in ’78 — not with Reagan running again in 1980, and not with liberal Republicans still roaming the halls of Congress. Down went Sen. Jacob Javits, Herbert Lehman’s literal and ideological Senate heir, in New York’s ’80 GOP primary, felled by a then-obscure Al D’Amato. Only after Reagan’s election did the purge mentality cease.

If that model holds, the Tea Party will be just as thirsty for GOP blood in ’12 as it is today — still enraged by TARP votes the way the New Right was still infuriated by the Panama Canal treaty in ’80.

Because only 10 GOP-held Senate seats will be up in ’12 — a consequence of the party’s drubbing in 2006 and weak showing in 2000 — only three incumbents seem at obvious risk of becoming the next Bennett or Murkowski: Olympia Snowe, Orrin Hatch and Richard Lugar.

Of the three, Snowe — at least for now — faces the most peril. A PPP poll last week found that 63 percent of Maine Republicans say they’d prefer a new, more conservative senator to Snowe in ’12. Her approval rating among self-identified conservative Maine Republicans is just 26 percent. And in a head-to-head trial heat with Chandler Woodcock, the party’s 2006 candidate for governor, she trails by 5 points, 38 to 33 percent.

Snowe’s offenses are lifelong; she’s the closest thing left to a Rockefeller Republican. So it’s hard to imagine her undergoing some kind of magical ideological transformation in time for ’12. That said, she could still conceivably save her seat, since the Maine electorate is unusually friendly to independent candidates. Her popularity remains strong and deep outside of the GOP base, so she could plausibly leave the party and wage a successful third-party bid.

 Hatch is more conservative than Snowe — far more conservative. But he also voted for the first TARP bill, back in the fall of 2008, and with 34 years of senatorial experience, he pretty much personifies the Washington wing of the Republican Party. Already, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a House freshman with strong grass-roots appeal, has toyed with the idea of challenging Hatch for the GOP nomination. And as Bennett’s example this year showed, ousting an incumbent in Utah can be easy: Without 40 percent of the vote at the party’s right-wing-dominated states convention, candidates can’t appear on the primary ballot. Bennett, another TARP supporter, failed to reach this threshold — and there are signs that Hatch could have trouble clearing it, too.

Indiana’s Lugar, at least on paper, is safer — if only because the most obvious Tea Party-backed challenger, state Sen. Marlin Stutzman, is likely to win a House seat this fall and might now want to risk it after one term. Stutzman came out of nowhere to wage a credible bid for the GOP Senate nomination, finishing 10 points behind Dan Coats in the May primary — a performance that led Red State to brand him a “rock star.”

Still, Lugar has run afoul of the right with his TARP votes and his more recent support for Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination — and he reeks of Washington insiderdom just as badly as Hatch. Who knows, maybe Stutzman will challenge him anyway? Or maybe it won’t even take Stutzman to make Lugar sweat.

Snowe, Hatch and Lugar are just the most obvious targets. Bob Corker and Jon Kyl also cast “yes” votes on TARP, and all are up in ’12. For various reasons, they seem less likely to attract the Tea Party’s ire in a primary, but nothing is impossible. (The scandalized Jon Ensign, who also voted for TARP, will be up for reelection, but few believe he’ll actually run.)

 Some believe that a poor showing by some of this year’s Tea Party candidates will give the GOP base pause about embracing more of them in 2012 Senate primaries. If O’Donnell and Sharron Angle lose, the thinking goes, a chastened GOP electorate will be more careful when it comes to balancing purity and electability.

But that thinking is flawed. Just remember: After he kicked Clifford Case to the curb in 1978, Jeffrey Bell lost by 10 points in the general election. But that didn’t slow the New Right down at all, just as a loss or two this fall won’t slow the Tea Party. In other words, what we saw last Tuesday in Delaware was both an exclamation point on this year’s primary season and a preview of what’s to come two years from now.

Reid is going to attach the DREAM Act to defense appropriation bill, which is a common, slightly dirty trick that represents one of the few ways to get anything voted on in our stupid Senate.

This bill would only help young, American-educated model citizens. Only about 825,000 people would probably become citizens. The act was proposed — in 2001! — by Republican Orrin Hatch. Even those lovable, Democrat-hating cranks at Reason like the bill. In 2007, Hatch and Bob Bennett voted to add the act to the defense authorization bill.

And this year, of course, Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett will vote against the bill. And John McCain will block the defense appropriations bill if it includes shamnesty for innocent children or allows patriotic gay Americans to serve their country in the military.

It’s obviously cynical to attach this bill to the defense appropriations on the eve of the midterm elections, but if cynical electioneering is the only way to get things done, I’ll take it. Hatch, however, will not.

“Senator Hatch doesn’t support cynical political stunts,” spokeswoman Antonia Ferrier said in a statement. “This defense bill shouldn’t be held hostage to unrelated measures that have no chance of becoming law. He believes we need to keep working to regain the American people’s trust by securing the borders.”

Right, of course. Except that Hatch voted for the same stunt three years ago, but whatever.

Meanwhile, Tom Coburn, the Senate’s most conservative obstetrician, is now blocking the new food safety bill, because he is a raging prick. Oh, and because of the deficit.

Coburn can single-handedly halt action on the bill just by threatening to object, which is a pretty cool way for our nation’s legislature to work. Just remember to not eat any eggs until this bill is paid for, Americans.

And, of course, Fed nominees and judges are just not happening.

I can’t wait for the next Congress!

Here’s what he said to the Salt Lake City Fox affiliate:

HATCH: Let’s be honest about it, in the First Amendment, religious freedom, religious expression, that really express matters to the Constitution. So, if the Muslims own that property, that private property, and they want to build a mosque there, they should have the right to do so. The only question is are they being insensitive to those who suffered the loss of loved ones? We know there are Muslims killed on 9/11 too and we know it’s a great religion. … But as far as their right to build that mosque, they have that right.

I just think what’s made this country great is we have religious freedom. That’s not the only thing, but it’s one of the most important things in the Constitution. [...]

There’s a question of whether it’s too close to the 9/11 area, but it’s a few blocks away, it isn’t right there. … And there’s a huge, I think, lack of support throughout the country for Islam to build that mosque there, but that should not make a difference if they decide to do it. I’d be the first to stand up for their rights.

And now he will surely lose his next election, in 2012, unless this whole controversy is just another cynical effort to gin up the base during a long, hot August, and everyone will have basically forgotten about it in two years. (Except maybe for some Muslims in America and abroad.)

And, for some reason, John Cornyn approvingly quoted a far-right secessionist novelist guy.

But while the Republicans hate Thurgood Marshall for extending those damn “special protections” (like regular protections, but for non-white people) to minorities, they want to make it clear that they expect any potential Supreme Court justice to always support the rights of their favorite put-upon minority groups: the United States military, incumbent senators, Republican presidential candidates, and corporations.

After Pat Leahy’s interminable opening questions about how much Kagan loved her parents and how nice and well-respected she is, Sessions began hammering her on the military recruiters thing. The issue was, the military was unable to sign Harvard’s nondiscrimination pledge, because it is, you know, a discriminatory employer. So it had to use the veterans’ organization instead of the Harvard Office of Career Services.

Sessions, in repeatedly asking why Kagan did not grant special treatment to the military, kept asking her why she discriminated against the military and treated our brave recruiters “in a second-class way.” Silly legal progressive — you’re only allowed to treat gay people in a second-class way.

(Kagan was asked if she thought Bush v. Gore was decided correctly. In 2003, she knew that it was not decided correctly. This morning she declined to answer.)

Orrin Hatch questioned Kagan on the Citizens United case. Kagan, obviously, argued that case, which would seem to make her position on the matter of the constitutionality of campaign finance laws known. But she told Hatch that as a judge, she would consider it “settled law.”

Hatch nearly got teary-eyed when discussing the poor corporations of Utah that were discriminated against by campaign finance laws. Why does Kagan hate Utah’s thousands of corporations that are made up of only one person? (Though theoretically this one-person corporation could conduct political speech as a one-person ,,, person.)

The conversation got weird when Hatch seemed to claim that restrictive campaign finance laws were somehow not bad for incumbents:

Kagan says campaign finance laws were “selfless” act of Congress, because all empirical evidence suggests union and corporate money protects incumbents.

“Tell that to Blanche Lincoln,” Hatch says. “Lincoln is one of the nicest people around here who had ten million spent against her by the unions, just because they disagreed with her.”

OK, but … Blanche won. And doesn’t Orrin think money is protected political speech? And if so, isn’t spending money to defeat her because you disagree with her policies … basically the entire point of politics? Unless Orrin wants Kagan to decide that unions aren’t allowed to be mean to his Senate friends, I guess.

Hatch was also outraged that the president criticized the Citizens ruling … while the Supreme Court was in the same room as him. The nerve! The court is very sensitive! Obama should’ve formed a one-man corporation in Utah and bought thousands of TV ads, if he wanted to exercise his right to express an opinion on the decision.

Kagan is expected to be easily confirmed because this whole thing is basically a fun way for the Senate to pass the time without having to pass legislation or anything.